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What, exactly, is the purpose of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has turned into a unclear right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in the past few months, has claimed additional of that power for himself, conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, a great deal of the power to allocate federal funds has also defaulted to the executive, with the White House claiming the ability to abort legislatively approved spending and attempting to redirect the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; virtually all bills must currently be packed into spending packages, huge recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can bypass the filibuster. But when those don’t pass – and more and more, they do not – the federal government just shuts down. At least, big parts of the government do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of the House and Senate can appear rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ messaging could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated response to trends occurring in other states: Republican-controlled states have long embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their district lines via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided House control and a long-term feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is clearly intended as a countermove to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in Texas, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (The left in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in seeking to alter districts.)

The state initiative seems probable to be approved, as progressive voters react with concern and anger to Trump’s authoritarian centralization of power and seek methods to restrain his worst impulses. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the move could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to draw their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Others have questioned the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is never really in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, necessarily, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, discussion and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to party primaries, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that the measure will spur the right to redraw their respective maps in response, fails as a causal argument: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s measures when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The GOP, it can be noted, has not needed any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure long-term seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of similar actions by the left, for years.

The other objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy shift, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better world – in the reality that most the left, it is believed, yearn for and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that elections are made uncontested. That these actions have grown essential in order to slow the authoritarian advance of the president’s control and lessen the level of harm he is capable to inflict is unfortunate; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the fight against the current administration’s ideology has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, exactly, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the power to examine. Even in our era of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to significant impact. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and the state’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet columnist